1948

ConfidentialCOMMUNISM AND THE US GOVERNMENT
(Excerpted from a response to a compilation of
materials provided on 25 July 1975.)

Sometime probably December of 1950, the Board of Directors of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in New Jersey, probably at the instigation of Parker Morgan (a former FBI and OSS agent, at that time a member of the Board), visited J. Edgar Hoover in relation to the unreasonable attacks which were occurring on the HDRF. Mr. Hoover’s assistant apparently inferred that these attacks must be of communist origin and referred the existing Board and in person conducted them to the head of the Communist Activities Division. He appeared very withholdy and confused by this sudden advent of the Board but he gave the Board to understand that it probably was of communist origin. The Board of Directors made a bargain with the FBI to turn over to them the names of all staff members in all the existing orgs at that time and the FBI made a bargain in return to return to them those names which were not communist. There were one thousand names on the list. Two hundred and fifty-two of these names had been deleted by the FBI. The FBI said that it could not tell them directly that these people or anyone was a communist but it used this method of singling out the communists connected with the organization.

In this fashion a spirit of cooperation was built by the FBI directly to hunt down communists who were knocking apart the organization. Through 1952 the FBI was also reportedly active trying to locate certain communists who supposedly had joined the organization.

It was however the FBI which planted the idea with the HDRF and with me that all our trouble was stemming from the communists. We were in fact under this direct impression throughout 1950 and until the outright attack by the United States government in ‘62. This matter, then, was directly caused by government propaganda. I never believed there was any particular conspiracy against the organizations and did not take any particular action until the early ‘60s at which time I put on my own intelligence officer hat and did an appreciation of the general scene. That appreciation took it straight out of the communist line of think and more or less accurately described the scene which we have been running down since that date. My prediction in the matter was true. That of the Justice Department and federal government was knowingly false.

During the time that the Justice Department and other government agencies were propagandizing the American people and us to believe that communist infiltration was the cause of all these strange dirty tricks which were occurring, the federal government was itself engaging in various dirty tricks against its own people. Intelligence files have demonstrated that there were various circulations against me and Scientologists occurring in the early ‘50s. During that period of time the Justice Department must have been well aware of that and yet continued to pose as a protector. All that I can make out of this at this writing and without further study of the matter is that this was a government ploy.

It is highly probable that every approach to me on the subject of going to Russia from 1948 on was a direct instigation by the federal government agencies.

Had I at any time accepted such a suggestion they could have arrested me and destroyed me.

It looks like a case at first glance here of police provocation.

At this writing, and purely for propaganda purposes, I would estimate that the late ‘40s and ‘50s communist infiltration scares, including those of McCarthy, were direct instigations of federal government agencies to bring about various purposes best known to themselves. They had the Korean War promoted. They had the Vietnamese War promoted and I wonder how much actual communist infiltration ever occurred. And I also wonder how much share of blame for the cold war the United States bears. During the ‘50s they had every church and social organization believing that it was being attacked and infiltrated by communists. We now know from the “Enemies List” and from various revelations that the federal government itself was engaged in dirty tricks against social and cultural groups in America. And in this instance particularly they certainly were at pains to make the early Dianetics and Scientology
organizations believe that they were being victimized by the communists and we know very well that it was the federal government itself which was keeping the organizations upset.

SUMMARY

The matter is neither actionable nor libelous toward me as in each case of “communist” approach, I gave a very thorough “no.”

These files are valuable in that they disclose the fact that somewhere there may be an operations file or memo or plan to provoke me into accepting a discreditable invitation.

The entire atmosphere that was built around myself and organizations in the ‘50s was that communists were seeing we were being hit in America so that we would be driven to collaboration with Russia. It appears that this structure was probably a fabrication by US agencies to bring about some sort of incrimination.

Whoever originated such a plan or whoever originated the attacks and prevailed upon the federal government to engage upon them remains of vast interest to us. As these approaches after the war could be considered as covert or intelligence approaches, it is highly unlikely that the persons making them would go to any great effort to identify themselves or impinge upon one’s memory. Intelligence has a habit of employing people who are non-descript and who are not easily remembered. Furthermore, it is highly probable that the persons were not even using their right names.

The value of the information provided has been to expose a possibility of a much earlier conspiracy and perhaps even a criminal police provocation which was pulled not only on us but upon many, many people to make them believe that activities of the US government in the order of “dirty tricks” were communist in origin so as to stimulate some war enthusiasm or for some other discreditable reason.